Sunday, July 21, 2013

How might we respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin?

I attended a demonstration last
week of people who were appalled at the Florida court decision that found the
murderer of Trayvon Martin not guilty.Clearly George Zimmerman stalked Martin and Trayvon made a phone call
where he said he felt threatened by Zimmerman.Clearly Zimmerman would not have stalked Martin if he was
white.Yet the judge in this case
did not allow the issue of race to be mentioned in the trial.

Zimmerman claimed that he acted in
self-defense.However, in order to
shoot Trayvon, he needed to take his gun out of the holster and release the
safety.This would have been
extremely difficult if he acted in self-defense.A police officer specifically told Zimmerman not to stalk
Trayvon.In other words, Zimmerman
was a vigilante who had his gun out and cocked as he approached Trayvon.This is clear evidence of premeditated
murder.

District Attorneys normally don’t
have much trouble in sending people to prison.In fact, anyone who lives in this country has a better
chance of going to prison than citizens in any other nation in the world.Black people are grossly
over-represented in prison, and the Supreme Court has stated in their decision
of McCleskey v. Kemp that they don’t have much problem with this.Understanding this reality, we can see
why so many people have been appalled when the world heard the verdict of not
guilty in the murder case against George Zimmerman.

The proposals of how to respond

There have been several proposals
as to how to respond to this appalling verdict.Some people are organizing to repeal the Stand-Your-Ground laws.These laws make it easier for vigilantes
to take the law into their own hands and murder people like Trayvon Martin.

While I would applaud the
rescinding of these laws, this will not solve the problems we face.Police officers murdered Shawn Bell
with fifty shots and they were found not guilty.Police officers murdered Amadu Dialo with forty-one shots
and they were found not guilty.Police officers were filmed viciously beating Rodney King and they were
found not guilty.The repeal of
the Stand-Your-Ground laws would not stop the murder of unarmed Black men by
police officers.

There are people who demand that
Attorney General Eric Holder charge Zimmerman with the hate crime of murdering
Trayvon Martin because he was Black.I would also support this course, but first we might consider the
question: Who is Eric Holder?

Before Holder became Attorney
General he worked for the law firm Covington & Burling.Holder represented the corporation
Chiquita Brands International.Chiquita admitted to financing a terrorist organization known as the United
Self Defense Forces of Columbia.Holder brokered a deal where Chiquita paid out $25 million to make up
for their support of these murderers.

The estimate is that this
organization murdered about 4,000 people.Some of the people who this organization murdered attempted to improve
the working conditions of banana workers who toiled for Chiquita.

I believe we might keep this in
mind when thinking that Attorney General Eric Holder will in any way be
interested in a meaningful interpretation of the word justice.What can we
expect from someone who takes money to defend the financiers of mass murderers?

Then, there are people who are
working to boycott the state of Florida where the acquittal of Zimmerman took
place.Here we might learn from
the words of Malcolm X who lived at a time of Jim Crow segregation.

Malcolm argued to: “Stop talking
about the South.If you’re south
of Canada you’re in the South.”

Malcolm also argued against
appealing to the federal government to enforce their civil rights laws.Instead, he proposed appealing to the
World Court to place the United States government on trial for human rights
violations against the millions of Black people who live in this country.

So, the question continues to be:
How do we respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin?In order to begin to answer this question, we need to look
at a bit of history.

Nat Truner, Denmark Vessey, and John Brown

Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner
both organized slave rebellions.State authorities organized their executions as well as the executions
of their followers.

Even the Supreme Court in this
country ruled in its Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, that they felt slaves were
not human beings entitled to rights under the law.

John Brown organized an attack on
a garrison at Harpers Ferry in Virginia.This armed uprising attempted to capture arms that would be used to free
slaves.The uprising was defeated
and Robert E. Lee was one of the commanding officers that captured John Brown
and his followers.Like Nat Turner
and Denmark Vessey, the government ordered John Brown and his followers to be
executed by hanging.

John Brown didn’t anticipate the
fact that in just a few years millions of union soldiers would be mobilized to
militarily defeat the slave owners.In the end, it was Robert E. Lee that surrendered the Confederate army
at the Appomatox Court House in Virginia.

After the Civil War,
Reconstruction Governments emerged in the former Confederate states.These governments were the most democratic
in the history of this country.For the first time, former slaves as well as poor whites learned how to read
and there were many other progressive reforms.

Then, in 1877 the Republican
President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the union army to leave the former
Confederate states.This prompted
a counter-revolutionary movement organized by forces that became the Ku Klux
Klan.New governments that
enforced Jim Crow segregation replaced the Reconstruction governments.The Supreme Court, in effect, reversed
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution with their Plessey
v. Ferguson decision.

All of this meant that while the
Civil War ended slavery, Black people, in effect, lost citizenship rights in
this country.One of the effects
of these events was that racist mobs murdered thousands of Black people, and
the government almost never did anything about it.

Ida Wells

Ida Wells was a Black journalist
who investigated 728 lynchings in this country.At the time, many prominent people argued that while
these lynchings were wrong, Black men had a tendency to rape white women.Ida Wells discovered that in one third
of these lynchings Black men were not even accused of rape.In fact, in many cases it was the white
women who had pursued Black men.On the other hand, Wells discovered that there was a long history of
white men who raped Black women, where the government never prosecuted the
rapists.

As a result of this rein of
terror, Ida Wells encouraged Black people to leave her hometown of Memphis,
Tennessee.Wells also advised
Black people that: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every
home.”“When the white man ...knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his
Afro-American victim does, he will have a greater respect for Afro-American
life.”

The lynching of Claude Neal

Claude Neal was one of the Black men
who was lynched in the state of Florida in 1934.About 10,000 people attended this lynching.The authorities understood that mobs
were forming to lynch Neal.A
judge ordered Neal to be sent to a jail in Alabama to await a trial.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan went
to Alabama, attacked the jail, kidnapped Neal, and returned him to Florida to
face a lynching.This lynching was
advertised in the local newspapers.

A letter writing campaign was
organized to appeal to President Franklyn Roosevelt to intervene to stop this
lynching.Several federal laws had
been broken and Roosevelt had taken an oath to enforce the laws of this
country.However, Roosevelt was a
Democrat who received support from Jim Crow politicians and refused to
intervene to stop the lynching of Claude Neal, or to arrest his murderers.Roosevelt would also refuse to support
legislation specifically designed to stop lynchings in this country.

The lynching of Emmit Till and the civil rights movement

When racists lynched Emmitt Till
the time had come for people to mobilize to put an end to the madness of Jim
Crow segregation.First came the
Montgomery Bus Boycott.This was
followed by thousands Black people who would rather go to jail, than continue
to submit to the laws denying them citizenship rights in this country.

Robert F. Williams was a veteran
of the Korean War who lived in Monroe, North Carolina.Williams organized a chapter of the
National Rifle Association in Monroe to defend Black people in that city
against the mob violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The government eventually forced
Williams to leave this country.However, his organization, as well as those who supported Malcolm X,
demonstrated that if the government was not going to end Jim Crow, Black people
would defend themselves “by any means necessary.”

Conclusion

Martin Robinson Delany was a
nationalist and an abolitionist who worked in the Reconstruction governments
after the Civil War.At that time,
the dominant point of view was that the Civil War had “freed” the former
slaves.Delany argued that:

A people, to be free, must
necessarily be their own rulers: that
is, each individual must, in himself
embody the essential ingredient—so to
speak—of the sovereign principal which
composes the true basisof his liberty.”

Ever since the Civil War, there
has been a basic question that I believe we need to answer.Back people have toiled to produce much
of the wealth in this country.While
this is clearly true, do Black people have full citizenship rights in the United
States of America?When the
murderer of Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, we might ask: If Trayvon Martin
had citizenship rights in this country, wouldn’t his murderer have gone to
prison for this crime?

For the last thirty years working
people have experienced a deterioration in our standard of living.Black people have experienced the brunt
of the cutbacks.There has been
clear discrimination in education, health care, housing, salaries, as well as
access to loans.Hundreds of
thousands of people are being stopped and frisked.The overwhelming majority of those stopped and frisked are
Black.The murder of Trayvon Martin begs
the question as to whether Black people have the right to live free of
vigilante hoodlums.

The history of this country gives
us a clear vision as to how we need to respond to the murder of Trayvon
Martin.We need to organize a mass
movement that demands human dignity for all.This movement would state clearly that human needs are more
important than profits.This
movement would also look at history and state clearly that the only way to
solve the enormous problems we face is with a workers and farmers
government.In my opinion, this
would be the best way to respond to the murder of Trayvon Martin.

About Me

I am the author of the novel "Looking Back From 2101." My novel imagines a future world where poverty and discrimination are no longer a part of the human condition. My blog contains articles and poems that I've written over the years. Many of my poems are biographies of historical figures who I have found to be inspiring.